The Gun Show
A Planetary Remediation Journey: Part 4
Welcome to the…
One day, as I was driving around my neighborhood, I saw a sign advertising a gun show being held in, of all places, the local Polish American Community Center. My brain leapt at all of the possibilities, weighed the pros and cons, and I eventually decided that attending a gathering of the children of Mars was an ideal next step in this bizarre journey I was undertaking.
(There is, of course, an element of absurdity to the whole thing that is deeply appealing to me that I am absolutely not discounting. My fellow Sag risings can relate. LIFE IS A JOURNEY.)
First, a little background on me + weapons:
However, violence is truly upsetting to my psyche, and always has been.
This applies to any kind of violence—I’m not a fan of horror movies, I hate verbal confrontations, let alone physical fighting (bless this Cancer Mars & all my Libra planets), and am an overall fucking peacenik. I also definitely don’t hold any allegiance to our national love affair with guns.
On a scale of 1 - 10, my knowledge of firearms (or any kind of weaponry) stands at a firm 1.10.
I do have many friends that are interested in and knowledgeable about firearms, and from talking to them have gleaned an idea of the wide variety of personalities that are drawn to gun ownership—but I’ve never wanted to actually own one myself.
This is a polarizing subject to say the least, but I stand firm in my decision to approach the experience with an open mind.
Regardless of politics, I think we can all agree that the entire topic is under the jurisdiction of Mars, so I asked my most Martial friend to accompany me and prepared to walk into a place where like, maybe I was so out of my element that I couldn’t skate by on luck and charm? Imagine that, Izzy! Wild.
All weapons circle back to Mars.
Marble panel depicting Erotes gleefully playing with the chariot & weapons of Mars, from around 98-117 CE.
When the day finally arrived, I found myself crossing the threshold into a place that, if you’re looking at it from the point of view of an astrologer, is an actual temple to Mars.
I don’t know what I expected to see, but what I did see was row after row of tables laden with weapons and the folks selling those weapons. There were shotguns, rifles, handguns, vintage weapons, and a ton of knives. The place was hopping, and I was probably one of five women in the room. I didn’t feel threatened in any way, shape, or form — in fact, that was the weirdest thing about it: I’m so sensitive to atmosphere that I was fully prepared to feel a sharp dissonance between my energy field and the one I was infiltrating, but that wasn’t the case at all.
The vibe actually felt more mercantile, the waves emitted by vendors plying their wares amidst a bunch of competition: the selling, the buying, the negotiating — the setting was actually very Mercurial.
(Mercury is the god/planet ruling commerce and business. His ability to talk his way out of any situation is only one reason.)
I may not know anything about weaponry, but I absolutely know how to shop, so I applied those “skills” to the situation and simply wandered about the aisles looking at things. I saw some truly beautiful weapons, and was especially drawn to the knives. There were so many varieties of things to cut with that I began to get a little overwhelmed. I figured I should probably come home with a knife: an altar knife, a ritual knife, whatever — all I wanted was the physical manifestation of the experience I was having, consecrated in this temple of Mars.
I wandered back to a table I had passed by earlier, manned by a tall older gentleman with a silvery handlebar mustache sporting a fringed leather duster. I saw him watching, a hawk assessing its prey, and I greeted him in order to cut to the chase and avoid any boring preamble. I told him I was looking for my knife.
He showed me several specimens laid out on the table, and as he spoke, I was struck by a specific quality he emitted, a sense of not only walking between two worlds, but of the unspoken acknowledgement of it, as well as the resignation of understanding the necessity of it.
I recognized it because I live like that too. The way I am requires living a little bit up there, and a little bit down here. And, not for nothing, the absolute last place I thought I would encounter someone bearing that quality was the Gun Show at my local Polish American Community Center.
As I began to study him more closely, I noticed he was doing the same. I’m not exactly sure how we began our conversation, but at a certain point, he started to…sermonize. To make known his approach to the topics of this room, and of Mars. And I listened, because at that moment I knew that this was why I had come.
He spoke of desert snakes and his time in the military during the Vietnam War. He revealed tattoos clearly influenced by the occult, and with widened sky-blue eyes described transcendent shamanic journeys, a deep communion with life itself.
And in those few moments during which he shared some of his most transformative life experiences, I began to understand.
He took both my hands, held my gaze, and told me we were meant to meet. “Here, I have some hand-carved staffs over here, you should hold one and see how it feels,” he said as he guided me toward the far corner of his table. He handed me a beautiful spiral-shaped staff made of smooth, pale wood and watched my face as I took it in my hand. “I carved that out of poison sumac,” he informed me. “You need to respect any plant you try to make a weapon out of.”
And I could feel it, the poison in the wood, not poison that would hurt me, but its character, its essence.
I felt it communicate something to me, something along the lines of: “This is what I am. This is my nature.”
A deep truth had literally been handed to me by a high priest of the Red Planet.
It felt sinister yet pure, and at that moment, I felt new knowledge travel through my body. Knowledge that, in all likelihood, was already in my head — but the knowledge of the body is different. You can’t argue with it. It’s real.
My skin tingled where it touched the wood, almost as if it were winking at me. It was so obvious — poisonous things have a right to their poison. It’s what they are, it’s how they were created: as children of Mars.
The Moons of Mars
Fun fact: in Greek mythology, Deimos & Phoebos — Fear & Panic — are the sons of Ares/Mars and accompanied him into every battle, spreading terror in their wake. The two Moons of the planet Mars are their namesakes.
This is beyond any biological explanation; it’s about Martial themes, the red dominion, and how not everything falling under its jurisdiction is inherently evil, and should be honored.
This man had revealed something important to me, something eye-opening: the planets each represent one-seventh of existence, and one-seventh of anything and everything you can think off is ruled by each of them.
His philosophy towards these topics I have naturally shied away from my whole life made sense to me. He approached the creation and use of a weapon with spirituality and honor — not hatred and violence.
I don’t have to parachute out of a helicopter with relish in order to gun down a village, but blindly disregarding these themes and entities, and the fact that they exist for a reason, was robbing me of the power to choose their mode of expression.
It was robbing me of any capacity I hold within myself to fight for anything.
To fight is a necessity. You need to fight, to try, to carve out purpose from the raw material of life.
I’m not sure I even believe everything that came out of his mouth, especially since I’m sure he was hoping to make a sale, but he provided a mirror, an alternate reality in which I could establish my own relationship with the Martial sphere, armed with the knowledge that it can be done respectfully and with grace.
I bought a knife from him, by the way.
I was looking at the sharp array, trying to make a decision, when my eyes magnetically landed upon the one I would take home. His sale already in the bag, the High Priest of Mars approved my choice and threw one more thing at me: “Oh yeah, that one’s nice, the handle’s made out of ram’s horn.”
The Ram represents Aries, one of the domiciles of Mars.
Oh, and one more thing.
Having a Cancer Mars doesn’t negate one’s ferocity — it represses it.
Just look at little me at about 7 years old, wielding my father’s sword (he was really into Martial arts for a hot minute). Don’t tell me I wasn’t FEROCIOUS.
Next up is my experience with…DEMOLITION DERBY.